Inside the $5 Billion OM Crash and the Insider Wallets Behind It

Between April 13th and 14th, 2025, the OM token issued by real-world-asset platform Mantra fell more than 90%, erasing roughly $5 billion in market value in about a day.

Just days earlier, Mantra had been riding a wave of good news. On April 7th the project announced a $108,888,888 ecosystem fund backed by Laser Digital, Shorooq Partners, and other institutional names, and it had celebrated with Cointelegraph at a Paris event at the Shangri-La hotel — photos from which were still making the rounds on crypto Twitter as the token cratered. Mantra had marketed itself as a leader in regulated real-world-asset tokenization, holding a Dubai VARA license and describing itself as the first DeFi protocol to obtain a Virtual Asset Service Provider license.

OM traded at $6.32 on April 13th; by April 14th it had collapsed to $0.58, a drop of about 91%.

On-chain researchers moved quickly to reconstruct what preceded the crash. Lookonchain data showed seventeen addresses moving a combined $227 million worth of OM to exchanges shortly before the price fell. Within that group, wallets identified as linked to Laser Digital had sent more than $41 million worth of OM to OKX across a sequence of well-timed deposits.

One wallet tagged on Arkham Intelligence as belonging to Laser Digital moved 6.5 million OM — about $41.6 million — onto OKX across seven separate transactions starting April 11th. That withdrawal address, 0xB37DBDec19737d52cDC8fD969B92bAA9e044f26A, had itself received funding from 0x84EE76Aa90C9bACb96FCF8748a0cCC0C8BA9f248, also tagged on Arkham as connected to Laser Digital. A separate wallet, 0x9a46e2DceB5bfaF90fe4D248d569D61cbFd01a28, sold 4.25 million OM for more than $26.8 million ahead of the crash while still holding another 2.4 million tokens.

Laser Digital has denied any involvement in the collapse. The crash itself triggered almost $72 million in liquidations market-wide, and the outbound transfers came just two days after the ecosystem fund announcement, at what should have been a high point for investor confidence.

Mantra CEO JP Mullin placed responsibility on centralized exchanges, describing "reckless forced closures" and saying positions were shut down "without sufficient warning or notice" during "low-liquidity hours." He stated: "this dislocation was not caused by the team, the MANTRA Chain Association, its core advisors, or MANTRA's investors selling tokens. Tokens remain locked and subject to the published vesting periods."

Laser Digital issued its own denial: "Laser has no involvement in the recent price collapse of $OM… We want to be absolutely clear: Laser has not deposited any $OM tokens to OKX. The wallets being referenced are not Laser wallets." Shorooq said much the same: "It is important to note up front that Shorooq and Mantra have not sold OM tokens in the lead up to, or during, this crash."

The exchanges pushed back on the narrative that they were responsible. Binance attributed the event to "cross-exchange liquidations," while OKX pointed to "major changes to the MANTRA token's tokenomics model since Oct 2024" and flagged "several on-chain addresses executing potentially coordinated large-scale deposits and withdrawals." OKX founder Star Xu called it a "big scandal to the whole crypto industry."

Matters grew more complicated when on-chain investigator ZachXBT named two individuals — Denko, founder of Reef Finance, and a person known as Fukogoryushu — saying both had "allegedly been reaching out to a number of people asking for massive loans against their OM in the days leading up to the -90% crash." Denko had previously faced allegations of similar market manipulation before Reef Finance's October 2024 delisting from Binance, and before a 2021 $80 million OTC deal between Reef and Alameda Research that ended in mutual finger-pointing. In that earlier episode, Alameda bought REEF at a discount described as a "strategic investment," then quickly moved the tokens to Binance to sell or use as collateral; pressed on how much it still held, Alameda replied only, "What I have already said constitutes my comments on this."

ZachXBT later clarified his position, saying his findings pointed away from Laser Digital or Shorooq and toward Denko and Fukogoryushu specifically. Hours after ZachXBT's post, Fukogoryushu deleted his Twitter account, which had carried a bio — "Loved tasting blood ever since I was a kid" — that observers later found unsettling in hindsight. If the loan-seeking reports are accurate, borrowing against OM holdings rather than selling directly would represent a more indirect route to extracting value ahead of a crash the parties may have anticipated.

Retail investors reacted with anger. One self-described investor said they had put $3,500,000 into OM, now worth barely $200,000 — a loss of more than 90% — and added that a supposed partnership with a major UAE property company had been a key factor in the investment decision. Another commentator argued: "If insiders are telling you the drop was a mechanical mistake on CEXes, then their opinion is that the fair market price is still $5. If they're not buying now at $1 with their own money to arbitrage this trade, they're lying to you."

Mullin, for his part, floated recovery measures — including token buybacks and burns — during a Cointelegraph AMA, then followed up on April 15th promising a post-mortem within 24 hours backed by "verifiable on and offchain data" meant to show "the truth is on our side." OKX subsequently added a risk warning to the OM token page, again citing the tokenomics changes since October 2024 and the pattern of "potentially coordinated large-scale deposits and withdrawals."

The episode left the wider real-world-asset sector — until then held up as crypto's bridge to legitimate finance — facing pointed questions about credibility, given that a Dubai-licensed, institutionally-backed project could suffer this scale of trust collapse in barely 24 hours.